Opening the CSV in Excel: separator and accents

Our CSV files use a semicolon as the separator and UTF-8 encoding. Depending on the regional settings of your computer, Excel may put every row in a single column, or show accented characters incorrectly.

Simplest solution

Open the XLSX file from the archive instead of the CSV. It opens correctly everywhere, with the right columns and the right accents.

Importing the CSV properly in Excel

1. Open Excel with a blank workbook.
2. Go to Data, then From Text/CSV.
3. Select the CSV file.
4. Set File origin to Unicode (UTF-8).
5. Set Delimiter to Semicolon.
6. Load.

Postal codes losing their leading zero

Excel treats a postal code as a number and drops the leading zero, so 01000 becomes 1000. During the import, set the Postal Code column type to Text. In the XLSX file the column is already text.

Importing the SQL file

The SQL file is a set of statements for MySQL or MariaDB. Import it with your usual client, for example mysql -u user -p database < file.sql or phpMyAdmin.